THE NEW YORK SOCIAL HIERARCHY.

THE NEW YORK SOCIAL HIERARCHY. This article tells about an internet site that every two weeks gave numerical rankings to the young women in the New York social scene. The article has the wonder of describing a world I didn’t know existed. I guess, if you had asked me, I would have known it had to exist, but the article makes this world real. The article is in NEW YORK, which I would expect to be authoritative on the subject. There are thumbnail sketches of fifty of the important people in this world along with pictures of them. I must have known that there would be a lot of people competing on this scene, but here they are. Of the fifty I knew only the name “Hearst.” Along with the article is a list of the twenty most important New York socialites of all time. I knew most of those names. Some great novelists have written about this kind of social hierarchy in various places and times. Edith Wharton and Tom Wolfe have written about the New York hierarchy. Wharton wrote about it because she was born into it. Wolfe did because he believes that a novelist ought to write about that world. Another reason I liked the article is that it proved I was wrong. I had thought of Miss H (number 3 on the list of giants of the past) with a certain pity and amusement, perhaps a shrug. The article shows that I didn’t get it. She is a great success in achieving her goals and is an admired role model. As for the internet site, I imagine that in every social hierarchy in the world, past and present, the people in that world at any moment in time could have provided a numerical ranking of the social leaders and most of them would have agreed on the order. Now we have the internet to formalize the ranking.